It would be time that people take responsibility again for their own (and their countries') choices instead of blaming everything wrong on the mythical bogeyman Russia.
Monopoly is that word. "Pure Monopoly" is the term for the platonic ideal that people like to insist companies don't live up to and so aren't at all monopolistic.
That's more than the entire discretionary budget. Cutting that much requires cutting entitlements, even if the government stopped doing literally everything else.
I think that hermit now would be significantly more isolated than the closed door person, since no one else now is using physical mail for professional communication.
True, but it doesn't change the fact that in 2025 an engineer with a closed door but ethernet and cell connectivity is still likely to be inundated with a continuous stream of notifications and other forms of electronic correspondence with his peers.
Isn’t reading stuff on the internet more mainstream than buying things at Barnes and Noble? Not necessarily those specific things, but the notion that something needs to be physically available at a bookstore to be relevant is at best dated.
I think you should also assume it's called "Archive of our own" because of the same sense that Woolf had in "A Room of one's own". This is our space to do our thing, precisely because if it was someone else's space sooner or later they, at least ostensibly for good reasons, prioritize something else over our thing and it's destroyed.
So it's at least not at all a coincidence that AO3's authors are predominantly women. This story of assuming that they can thrive in a shared space and then discovering that, again often for ostensibly good reason, they're not welcome to use it after all, is very familiar to women. Whether you're being thrown out of a cafe for breast feeding ("Nudity, not allowed") or turned down by employers despite having the same skills as successful male candidates ("Bound to have kids and then we'd just have to replace her anyway") it gets wearisome, better to have a place of your own.
That's an interesting perspective, I hadn't considered that the name might be a reference to A Room of One's Own.
My understanding was that the whole "of our own" thing is mostly in reference to fanfiction sites going through a predictable cycle of becoming popular followed by overmonetizing, enshittifying and losing touch with the community, which means everyone migrates to the next site which becomes popular and repeats the cycle. Hence Ao3 run by a non-profit "of our own". But that might not be the only way in which it's true. I would certainly agree that it is somewhat of a safe space for all kinds of disparaged groups, women in general being the biggest of them
Will it? I’m not sure how the utilities structure their prices wrt the actual cost, but they definitely separate the baseline connection cost from usage on bills (at least in the US), so they may not be killed by people using very little power as long as the connection fee actually covers things.
The hardest possible demand to meet is random, reasonal, and spikey demand spread diffusely over a large area. Which is more or less homes.
Conversely the easiest possible demand to meet is localized constant and high demand. Basically AI datacenters or industrial users. These guys are basically paying for the grid and residential have it as a subsidy.
The supermajority of the price of electricity is fixed costs related to installing and maintaining capacity. The marginal problem of increasing generation or utilization is cheap. I believe it's like under 20% even for gas power where you have to buy gas. For grid solar it would be even crazier because marginally its basically free they really don't care how much you use it even goes negative but the fixed costs are everything.
So what causes a lot of social problems is when wealthy people get their own private solar because the whole current pricing structure revolves around wealthy people using a lot of electricity and paying down the connection costs for poor people. If they have solar the poor people are fronting the maintainence cost which destabilizes everything.
Unfortunately the connection fee does not cover all fixed cost. For a long time the model has been fairly "progressive" in this regard. Some of the fixed costs of the grid have been paid for by amortization over the per Kw cost, which had the effect of charging people who used more a larger chunk of these fixed costs. Now with the option to provide your own power if you have upfront capital for solar can build as big of a system as they want. As other comments in the thread have mentioned, net-metering is largely functioned as a subsidy to give money to people who are already doing fine financially. I want green energy, and I think that decentralization has definite benefits, but it's pretty hard to argue against maintaining the grid to allow re-balancing and covering supply shortfalls in specific areas. Here is a video discussing this problem - https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?si=ZzZhoApFW3khqrdq&t=720
What you could do is bill per energy in e.g. 15 minute chunks, and separately bill for transformer/line capacity by e.g. the peak usage in any such chunk over the contract period, like they do in Germany for atypical load profile industrial users since decades ago.
Net metering is overall just entirely stupid as a concept; measure inbound and outbound flow separately if you can't just measure the 15 minute chunks; bill grid fees on the energy price on inbound and only pay energy price on outbound.
Or even bill grid fees on outbound up to one of many available large substations, and thus handle the issue of demand across large distances making buildout of solar in a convenient but far away place not being disincentivized vs. more-demand-local buildout.
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